The Immortal 600: Surviving Civil War Charleston and Savannah

By Karen Stokes

In 1864, six hundred Confederate prisoners of war, all officers, were taken out of a prison camp in Delaware and transported to South Carolina, where most were confined in a Union stockade prison on Morris Island. They were placed in front of two Union forts as "human shields" during the siege of Charleston and exposed to a fearful barrage of artillery fire from Confederate forts. Many of these men would suffer an even worse ordeal at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, where they were subjected to severe food rationing as retaliatory policy. Author and historian Karen Stokes uses the prisoners' writings to relive the courage, fraternity and struggle of the "Immortal 600."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781625840578

Karen Stokes

Karen Stokes has been an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston for more than twenty-five years. Her special area of interest is the Confederate period, and she has authored and edited numerous books and articles on the subject, including three History Press publications, South Carolina Civilians in Sherman's Path (2012), The Immortal 600: Surviving Civil War Charleston and Savannah (2013) and Confederate South Carolina: True Stories of Civilians, Soldiers and the War (2015). Her most recent scholarly books, published by Mercer University Press, are An Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861-1865 (2019), and Incidents in the Life of Cecilia Lawton: A Memoir of Plantation Life, War, and Reconstruction in Georgia and South Carolina (2021).

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Introduction

This is the story of a remarkable group of men who endured injustice and cruelty as prisoners of the United States government during the war that raged in America from 1861 to 1865. Six hundred prisoners of war, all Confederate officers, were chosen to undergo an extraordinary ordeal that would earn them a place in history as The Immortal 600. Most of them were held as human shields on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, surviving a fearful barrage of artillery fire from nearby Confederate forts and batteries, and then, at Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, others were subjected to an even more appalling ordeal—but the story of the six hundred begins at Fort Delaware, a Federal prisoner of war camp located in the state of Delaware.

In the summer of 1863, a large number of Confederate prisoners from Gettysburg and Vicksburg arrived at Fort Delaware, significantly increasing the prison population. Before this time in the war, many of these soldiers would have enjoyed a good chance of exchange. Although attended with many controversies between the two governments, the exchange of prisoners of war between the United States and the Confederacy had been going on under the articles of the Dix-Hill Cartel since its enactment in July 1862. Less than a year later, however, the United States government put a stop to most prisoner exchanges, and after this, many thousands of men held in prisons in the North and South languished and died in captivity.

In 1864, in response to allegations of deliberate mistreatment of Union prisoners by their Confederate captors, the Union authorities commenced a policy of retaliation against prisoners of war in their hands. The retaliatory measures included reducing the food rations of Confederate prisoners and restricting their receipt of food and other comforts sent into prisons from family and friends. As a result, there was a rise in malnourishment, as well as all the sufferings and afflictions that went along with it, among the prisoners held by the North. The most singular and unconscionable manifestation of this retaliatory policy occurred when six hundred captive Confederate officers were taken out of Fort Delaware and sent into harsh, sometimes hellish conditions at Union prisons in South Carolina and Georgia.

CHAPTER 1

Prisoners of War at Fort Delaware

Fort Delaware was constructed in the 1850s on a marshy island, or rather a mud shoal, called Pea Patch Island, in the middle of the Delaware River. A massive pentagonal structure of granite and brick, it was surrounded by a wide moat. The walls of the fort enclosed a large parade ground, and 156 guns were mounted in its casemates, guarding both sides of the river. The acreage of the island had been reclaimed from swamplands by the building of levees, and when it rained sufficiently, the loamy, spongy soil became an unhealthy quagmire of mud and filth.

The fort was adapted for use as a prison in the early years of the War Between the States. Inside its walls, some of the windowed chambers for the guns (casemates) were floored to be used as prison cells, and outside, wooden sheds were constructed to accommodate the growing number of prisoners of war. Rooms in the garrison barracks inside the fort were set aside for Confederate officers of higher rank and other prisoners. In the spring of 1863, an expanded complex of wooden barracks was begun outside the fort on Pea Patch Island to house ten thousand prisoners. A six-hundred-bed hospital was also built outside the fort on the north end of the island adjacent to the new prison barracks. The barracks were barely complete when the first wave of Confederate prisoners began to arrive from Gettysburg in July 1863.

The prisoners housed in the new wooden barracks were grouped in administrative divisions numbering up to one hundred men. The enclosed yard, or pen, for the Confederate officers (with a capacity of two thousand) was an area of about two acres containing the barracks and a mess hall. It was surrounded by a high wooden fence and was directly under the guns of the fort. There was a larger adjacent prison pen for the private soldiers (capacity eight thousand), and it was separated from the officers’ area by an alley and two plank fences topped by catwalks, where sentries walked and kept watch night and day. A number of drainage ditches ran in all directions across the prison yards. Their brownish-green, nearly stagnant waters, controlled by flood gates, served to float off the waste and offal of thousands of prisoners, sometimes barely adequately.

Fort Delaware, located on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River. This is one of the illustrations in Reverend Isaac Handy’s diary, published in 1874. From the author’s collection.

In July 1864, Captain Henry C. Dickinson, a Confederate prisoner from Virginia, recorded his first impressions of Fort Delaware when he arrived at the island’s wharf in a crowded steamboat:

A levee is constructed around the whole island, but the spring tides sometimes carry the water over the walls. The officers’ gardens, I noticed, were in a high state of cultivation; indeed, they ought to be, being of alluvial soil, and irrigated by the ditches which convey the water into the moat around the fort. The fort walls were of granite or brown stone, quadrangular, and built for three tiers of guns. I expect if necessary two hundred guns could be mounted. I counted once about seventy in the western wall, besides twelve large guns on the parapet. The officers’ quarters, etc., were within the walls of the fort and made of brick. A bridge with a draw led to the fort on the west side. When we landed…we were marched on a lawn near the hospitals, where we were counted, rolls were called and a full search was made. I hid my money and valuables in the grass till the search was over.

In addition to prisoners of war, there were also a number of political prisoners held at Fort Delaware. After the war began, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus (a court order protecting citizens from unlawful detention), and during the course of the conflict, thousands of citizens, mostly Northerners, were arrested and incarcerated in various prisons. One of these political prisoners was Reverend Isaac W.K. Handy, a civilian Presbyterian minister. In the summer of 1863, after Handy made remarks critical of the United States government in a private conversation, he was reported, arrested and, without trial or due process, imprisoned at Fort Delaware. Reverend Handy believed that taking the oath of allegiance to the United States was tantamount to giving approval of the war, and, calling himself a prisoner for conscience’ sake, he refused to yield, although by taking the oath, he could have secured his release. During his fifteen months of confinement, he secretly kept a diary, and after the war, it was published and serves as a useful and reliable source about conditions in the prison, revealing what it was like to be a prisoner there for thousands of Confederate soldiers and officers, including the six hundred men destined to be taken out of Fort Delaware in August 1864.

In May 1864, Reverend Handy was moved into the wooden barracks of the Confederate officers, but before then, for nearly a year, he resided with the other political prisoners and Confederate officers who were quartered within the walls of the fort. These captives were better off for food and shelter than many of the other prisoners. On August 4, 1863, the clergyman described an incident that illustrated the difference between the treatment of those inside the fort and some of the prisoners kept outside its walls:

A number of prisoners came into the Fort-yard this morning, to get water, and to remove some bedding. Several of them crowding into a recess, out of sight of the sentinels, we soon found that the poor fellows were suffering for food, and two or three of our party threw them something to eat. The supply of bread, in all the rooms, seemed tolerably full, and we succeeded in getting a dozen or more loaves, which were thrown out to the sufferers in halves and quarters. It distressed me, to see the eagerness with which they threw up their hands, to catch at every piece.

Reverend Isaac W.K. Handy, a Presbyterian minister, secretly kept a diary during his fifteen months of confinement at Fort Delaware as a political prisoner. From the author’s collection.

This illustration from Reverend Handy’s diary depicts an incident in which he observed hungry Confederate prisoners catching crusts of bread tossed out to them from other prisoners inside the fort. From the author’s collection.

Although there were many Northern prisons with much higher mortality rates, disease was sometimes rampant at Fort Delaware, and some prisoners suffered from scurvy and dysentery. About half of all the deaths that occurred were due to a smallpox epidemic in 1863. Because of the marshy ground of the island, the bodies of the prisoners were buried in mass graves in nearby New Jersey. The commandant of the fort later claimed in his own defense, The number of deaths rendered it impossible to dig a grave for each body separately.

Many of the cases of dysentery in the prison population could likely be traced to unsanitary water. While residing inside the fort in 1863, Reverend Handy wrote it had caused him and other political prisoners to become sick with that condition (though later on, the clergyman reported that the quality of the water provided to the fort prisoners had improved). In September 1864, after being moved outside the fort, Reverend Handy